Telecare Aware has moved – see below

Pearl is one sharp cookie. She whizzes about reminding her clients to eat, drink, take medicine, or use the bathroom. She also guides the old folks from room to room as she chats about the weather or TV listings. Packed with home sensors, she is also a link into health and care systems. Read more.

Article looking to the future of remote health monitoring by mobile phones. Read more.

The Methuselah Mouse Prize site (http://www.mprize.org/): one for the academics – or anyone interested in the ‘fight against aging’. We picked up the link because of this article: ‘The reliability-engineering approach to understanding aging is based on ideas, methods, and models borrowed from reliability theory. Developed in the late 1950s to describe the failure and aging of complex electrical and electronic equipment, reliability theory … is so general in scope that it can be applied to understanding aging in living organisms as well. In reliability theory, aging is defined through the increased risk of failure.’

So, by definition, we are more likely to fail as we get older?Mmmm…

The changing face of mobile phone technology has implications for telecare. This article sets the context. To quote two examples from it: Orange and the French unit of Securitas, the big Swedish security company, have developed a home-alarm system that uses Orange’s GSM/GPRS network to send black and white pictures to security personnel as soon as a security breach is detected. Orange is also working with another company on wearable, GPRS-based systems for patients at risk of heart attack that can detect abnormal heart rhythms and send data to a hospital, where a doctor would call a patient in if cardiac arrest seemed imminent. Read more.

Thought provoking, with implications for the way telecare technology could go… Some cafes and retail stores in Seattle are begining to market products and services to passers-by using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The first target group is visually and hearing-impaired individuals who can benefit from positioning and navigation applications added to the system. Click here to read more.

Not telecare on the move yet – but a pointer to a possible future? Ford Motor Company putting automotive electronics expertise into service – community service. Click here to read the story.

Kent is running a leading telecare and telehealth project. Here’s the Guardian interview with Peter Gilroy, the driving force behind it. Click here to read the interview.